Mobi to markdown

Skill tejask0/agent-skills/mobi-to-markdown

A collection of reusable AI agent skills for everyday use.

Install

npx -y skills add tejask0/agent-skills --skill mobi-to-markdown

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What its author says it does

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Use when converting a MOBI, AZW3, or EPUB ebook into a clean Markdown note (e.g. for Obsidian) — covers Calibre ebook-convert, why pandoc produces HTML soup, adding YAML frontmatter, and promoting chapters to headings.

SKILL.md

2.8 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

MOBI → Markdown

Overview

Convert an ebook to clean, readable Markdown suitable for an Obsidian vault. Use Calibre's ebook-convert, not pandoc — pandoc on an ebook with no semantic headings emits raw <span>/<svg> HTML soup; Calibre's Markdown writer produces clean output directly.

Prerequisites

ebook-convert (Calibre). Check: ebook-convert --version. Install: sudo apt install calibre.

Steps

1. Convert

Calibre has no md output plugin — Markdown is produced by the TXT writer with --txt-output-formatting markdown. Output to .txt, then rename:

ebook-convert "input.mobi" "output.txt" \
  --txt-output-formatting markdown \
  --keep-links --keep-image-references
mv "output.txt" "output.md"

Italics, blockquotes, and numbered entries carry over intact. (--keep-links/--keep-image-references only take effect with a non-none formatting option.)

2. Add YAML frontmatter + H1

Prepend metadata so the note is searchable and shows a title:

---
title: <Title>
author: <Author>
translator: <if any>
publisher: <if any>
source: <input>.mobi (converted)
tags: [book, <topic>]
---

# <Title>
*<subtitle / edition line>*

3. Promote chapters to `##` headings

Ebooks navigate by an internal TOC, so chapter titles often land as plain bold/paragraph text. Promote each (Introduction, every Book/Chapter, Notes, Index) to ## so Obsidian's outline panel works. Add subtitles where the edition has them.

4. Clean up

Drop the duplicate title/TOC block at the top — heading-based navigation replaces the publisher's TOC page.
Collapse runs of blank lines.
Keep Notes and Index sections at the end.

Common Mistakes

Mistake	Fix
Using pandoc on the MOBI	Raw HTML soup; ebook has no semantic headings. Use `ebook-convert`.
Output file named `.md` directly	No `md` output plugin — `ValueError: No plugin to handle output format: md`. Output `.txt`, then rename.
Leaving chapters as bold text	Obsidian outline is empty; promote to `##`.
Keeping the original TOC page	Redundant with headings; delete it.
Case-only filenames in vault	`Foo.md`+`foo.md` collide on Mac/Android via Syncthing; name uniquely.

Reference output

Running this on a full-length public-domain classic (e.g. a well-known philosophy or literature text with a modern translation) typically produces: YAML frontmatter, every Book/Chapter plus Introduction/Notes/Index promoted to ##, original front-matter TOC removed, and a few thousand lines of clean Markdown.